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For the possibly non-existent audience of Spawning Tool blog readers who don’t follow /r/starcraft or Team Liquid, we’re very excited right now about our partnership with Team Liquid. We started talking to them at the end of last year and formally announced it at the beginning of the new year in this article, Spawning a New Partnership.

The article goes much more in-depth than I will here, but the partnership is based around what we see as a very symbiotic relationship between our app and TL’s content. Through the Overwolf platform, the Spawning Tool Build Advisor lets you see build orders in-game. Through their community, TL supports strategy content creation with TL Strategy and the PiG Daily. Together, StarCraft players have the best, current strategy whenever they start a game.

We appreciate all of the community feedback provided on the TL thread, Discord channel, Twitter, and wherever else you have found us. Hopefully you have already seen some minor improvements and bug fixes, but we have much more planned for both the website as well as the app.

We are very well aware of how demanding StarCraft is, both strategically and mechanically, but we also know how rewarding it can be. One repeated piece of feedback was how helpful the build order overlay would be to bringing back lapsed players or convincing friends to start playing StarCraft. That’s something that we have taken to heart, and we are excited to participate in growing the active StarCraft community!

We at Spawning Tool have been thrilled by the engagement and enthusiasm from the community in using our site. So far, we have had tens of thousands of replays uploaded and over 200 build orders shared. However, the biggest limitation and most common request we have is that you can only access the data from the browser. To address that, we’re excited to announce the Spawning Tool Build Advisor, the best way to learn a build order.

Through Overwolf, the Build Advisor allows you to follow a build order live with an in-game overlay during your game. Browse through the builds listed on our site, then select your winning strategy to use during any ladder or custom game. As soon as the game starts, the overlay will sync with the in-game timer and walk through each step of the build so you don’t miss a thing. And that’s it.

To get started, download and setup Overwolf, then install the Spawning Tool Build Advisor app. It will automatically launch when you start StarCraft.

We hope you find the app as useful as we have. As always, if you have any feedback, please reach out to us on twitter @spawningtool or via email spawningtool@gmail.com . We would love to know how we can improve your StarCraft.

At SpawningTool, we have always been dedicated to helping the starcraft scene, whether it was with providing the biggest pro replay database or giving you some killer builds for ladder! Today we are proud to announce that we are partnering with PSISTORM Gaming to further our goals in Esports! We will be working together to increase the amount of awesome StarCraft you guys get to see!

SpawningTool holds the largest collection of StarCraft 2 pro-level replays, build orders, and replay statistics. The site uses machine learning and the information stored in the replays to generate these statistics, label build orders, and organize games by series/event.

With the success the site has seen over the last 6 months, we have no one to thank except the community. In order to give back, we are going to host a $200+ invitational and release a new plugin coming soonTM. This plugin is going to allow you to have any build from the site shown live, in-game, without disrupting your perfect micro of course!

Matcherino is a extremely powerful website that gives any tournament or showmatch host the ability to crowdfund their tournament. They recently launched their new Tournaments Feature, which has automatic payouts, crowdfunding capabilities, stretch goals, and more! We at SpawningTool are very excited to have Matcherino as a sponsor plan on inviting them to any other events we host in the future. We are going to be using this Tournament Feature in this Invitational

This tournament is also sponsored by OSC, providing OSC points to all participants!

Spawning Tool has been around for years. It has seen its ups and downs, but never have we seen the activity we saw right after the LotV launch. Our plan to prepare for the launch was to get the build orders feature launched and try to market it as much as possible. The expectations was that the site views would go up by a pretty decent amount, because people need build orders!

These days it can be hard to find build orders. Many of the sites that posted quality builds, stopped mid HotS. This left a niche open for us to jump into! Apparently we did something right!

After the LotV launch, we saw a HUGE jump in views.

When we got this info, we were happy that the preparation paid off. We were glad to see that despite all the talk of the decline of StarCraft and no one laddering, there was clearly a huge interest in build orders and replays.

Here are some more stats that we have gathered!

This is a very promising sign to see. The fact that more than half of our views are from people that have already used the site before leads us to think that we are doing our jobs well. People would not come back to a site if they did not see any improvement value in it.

One thing we have been really hyped about is the amount of people on the site throughout the day. As I am writing this post, it is 6am EST. The site has been averaging from 20-40 active viewers every time that I have checked since the launch.

Build wise, there are many people posting, viewing, and getting involved. There can never be enough StarCraft content though! If any of you have a cool build or idea, you’re welcome to add your builds. Or if you just want to learn a new build, just come by to study up (and vote and comment while you’re at it). We are very open to getting new people to help out if they are interested.

Overall, thanks to all the content creators and build posters that have gotten involved already. You guys made this entire plan possible! We want to continue this and are excited for the future of Spawning Tool and StarCraft :).

I usually try to post interesting things from Spawning Tool data, but here’s a very boring result from some analysis I did. Using the ~15,000 professional HotS replays in Spawning Tool, I bucketed them by month and then calculated the average game length. I was thinking that maybe game lengths would have increased as players got better and didn’t lose as much early. As you can see that didn’t happen as game lengths remained roughly the same (about 16 minutes)

I didn’t dig too much further because I didn’t really see any trends. You can see the data I used to generate the graph at

You might be wondering: what type of all-in starts with economic cheese? The type that wants to have a sustained attack as soon as possible, that’s what.

In this game, Snute cuts corners and goes for almost pure Drones for the first 4 minutes of the game. This allows him to get up to 6 Extractors and spread Drones across 3 mineral lines before he lines up his attack. From there, he streams Roaches and Ravagers across the map to bust down walls and forcefields to force his way into the Protoss base.

On the flipside, State played it safe opening Gateway first, then getting his Nexus afterwards. WIth a quick +1 attack, he also gets his 3rd base quickly after scouting Snute’s greedy build, and then into Blink.

When the Ravagers attack, State already has his simcity in place with Gateways clogging up the entry into his 3rd base, so despite being down at times 70 to 15 army supply, Snute has difficulty finding space to push in. State continues to build pylons to power his Gateways and for the Overcharge.

With Blink up, though, State makes a great hold: his 3 base economy (with more Probes than Snute has Drones) allows him to slowly get back into the game while Snute’s slow Roaches walk across the map. The battle continues on for minutes, but State keeps his 3rd base alive and evens the supply count. When the pressure begins to lighten, State is able to push for a 4th base as his minerals begin to run out his in main. When the supplys even up, he traps Snute’s army and pushes across for the win.

Most upvoted build order: MorDka

MorDka shared his 2base immortal adept all-in as a new way for Protoss players to remind Zerg players what WoL felt like. You can read up on how it works, follow the build order, run the real-time build order, read the analysis and watch replays about how it works. Here are a few thoughts from the creator:

1. How are you liking the LotV beta so far?

Legacy of the Void is a lot of fun and frustrations since it’s so different than HotS. The game allows for more comebacks with the new units and the stronger defenders advantage. The fast pace of the game makes it more stressfull especially for lower level players and that’s why archon mode is so good, I really enjoy it.

2. How well is the build working on the ladder?

Well… Actually after the newest patch the build doesn’t work so well. Slowing down the warp in time made the warp prism way more vulnerable to corrosive bile and the adept nerf made the build quite a bit weaker but i think that it’s still viable on master level.

3. What builds are your opponents using that are giving you the most trouble?

The game has a bigger defenders advantage right now so there aren’t any specific build orders that i have trouble with. It’s usually a specific new unit that causes the troubles. For example Liberators or Lurkers.

Of course, LotV isn’t coming out for another month, but we actually just saw our LotV beat HotS in our google analytics data, so it seems that the tide is turning, and we want to make sure that the most useful data is available easily. We will, for the foreseeable future, continue to keep our HotS site online, but especially with the replay format changes, those replays just aren’t so useful anymore.

One question we have had a few times is why we split the sites. The primary reason is because the data is very different, and we had to have separate logic for both of them. Specifically, the unit types and game speed actually require different backends in place. Because of that, we felt that the data was altogether incompatible, so keeping them together would just muddle up statistics.

As for why you don’t share you user account between the two? That’s mostly laziness. The 2 sites are on different databases, and I didn’t put forth the effort to sync up the authentication between them.

These histograms show the research time for various upgrades in Legacy of the Void. The data comes from ~2200 replays uploaded to http://lotv.spawningtool.comof all levels of play from the beginning of beta. About 25% of games are from professional tournaments. The same includes about 1500 Zerg replays, 1200 Protoss replays, and 1000 Terran replays.

The graphs are bucketed by LotV (real-time) seconds. In some cases, extreme outliers to the right have been removed from the data for a better visualization. Note that the Warp Gate timings may not be exactly right while Blizzard tweaks with the exact impact of Chronoboost, but it should still be very close.

Let us know if there’s anything else you want to see from our data. We will try to see what we can do, but in the mean time, play around with the research tool to see what you can find yourself! http://lotv.spawningtool.com/research/winrates/

Also, if you could help us make the data as accurate as possible by uploading your replays, that would be amazing!